To enter the world of Raphaël Gyllenbjörn is to enjoy an explosion of colour and an often dizzying deconstruction of the dynamics of dimension. His very personal form of abstract expressionism is a head-on collision of chaos and order generating canvases of alluring depth, creating 3D effects and surprising subtelty.
Raphaël was highly inspired by post Word War II pioneering abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning in America, and by the legendary COBRA group in Europe, with painters such as Karel Appel, Sam Francis and Asger Jorn. Lamenting that the 60s vogue for pop art had apparently led to diminished interest in abstract expressionists, Raphaël picked up the threads where they had left off. As he pushed the boundaries even further, he marvelled at the access he gained to hitherto unexplored horizons so tantalisingly alluded to in their work.
Raphaël maintained that art has a life far beyond the labels attached to contemporaneous movements. In the catalogue of his first exhibition in Stockholm in 1982 he wrote: "In our world, weighed down by definitions, art will continue to give evidence of that which is impossible to capture by means of theoretical concepts, because the miracle of art is the way it hints at a reality that remains forever elusive."